Biden Campaign Tries to Spark Another Donald Trump Hoax by Manipulating Charlottesville ‘Little Peanut’ Quote

The Biden campaign is again working to contrive a false narrative about former President Donald Trump by twisting his post-court remarks.

After Trump’s Day of court in the Manhattan business records trial concluded, he spoke to reporters. Trump said the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, riot, which he has strongly condemned, “was a little peanut” compared to the widespread antisemitic protests taking place on college campuses across the country and slammed President Joe Biden for having an “absolutely horrible message” on the matter.

In Trump’s full quote, he says:

And, very importantly — as you look at the various colleges all over the country and beyond colleges because it’s happening in other areas, too — you see what’s happening on the front having to do with Palestine and Israel and protests and hate, anger. Biden is sending an absolutely horrible message — horrible, horrible message. He has no idea how to message. He can’t speak; he can’t put two sentences together. He doesn’t know what to do. This is not our president. This is somebody that shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing because he can’t do it — he can’t do it well. We’re having protests all over. He was talking about Charlottesville; Charlottesville was a little peanut and it was nothing compared — and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here. This is tremendous hate, and we have a man that can’t talk about it because he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand what’s going on with our country.

The @BidenHQ X account quickly spliced the video into an eight-second clip that omitted the quote’s larger context, writing in its caption, “Trump says neo-Nazis and KKK members marching in Charlottesville chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us’ was ‘a little peanut’: ‘It was nothing.'”

The disingenuous caption fails to note that Trump was comparing Charlottesville to the outbreak of antisemitism at many American universities, as the video itself starts only after Trump had already established that was the context in which he was speaking.

The Biden campaign’s manipulation efforts mirror that of the “Bloodbath” hoax in March. At a Buckeye Values PAC rally for Ohio Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno, Trump forecasted a financial “bloodbath” in the U.S. auto industry if he was not elected. The Biden campaign disingenuously edited that video to omit the auto industry context.

“Crooked Joe Biden and his campaign are engaging in deceptively out-of-context editing,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said at the time.